Relational public space New challenges for architecture and planning education Sabine Knierbein and Chiara Tornaghi Introduction This book discusses relational perspectives on public space in order to present a way forward in dealing with new challenges in architecture and planning education. Developing a pedagogical approach based on urban life and difference in public space is a crucial and a much needed challenge in an increasingly complex and accelerated urbanised world. Considering the ramifications of spatial practice and strategic interventions on urban everyday life, this is a key task for the education of urban professionals. Alternative (relational) ways of envisioning space are particularly needed in architecture and planning schools in order to reflect critically on the crucial role of academics and to amend historical patterns in the production of space. These relational enquiries into public space have the potential to address ethical and knowledge-related concerns in those disciplines that are particularly oriented towards shaping the material urban environment. We call these ‘conceptual challenges’ as they bring new ways of conceptualising public space and how to research it. We will show, for example, that theory can be informed by embodied social practice. Urban collectives, in gaining spatial momentum, start to form critical counter publics; this might lead to a continuous reconfiguration of what can be considered as public space. The changing nature of social relations and political claims can be revealed and analysed in public space if they are understood as socio-historical processes. While urban collectives and urban movements might not always reach the point of becoming ‘critical counter publics’ (Fraser 1990), there are many ways in which theory and practice can be informed by the effervescence of daily life, and by the way people both engage with and signify space. These are ‘practical challenges’: we have engaged with a number of media instruments and interactive tools that can best reach people – for example, pupils, adolescents or the elderly. These have great potential for the training of future professionals and enhancing technology-based design and planning. But change can also be instigated by influencing the institutions that mediate and frame public space design and planning processes. Transforming institutional action can be achieved by provoking change in the training of young professionals who are likely to hold relevant positions in those institutions that will frame and shape public space and related policy instruments. In this respect, studies from within academia, which are situated at the interface of theory, practice and policy, raise new research challenges. A perspective transversing these three angles – conceptual, practical and research challenges – is the educational mission that lies at the heart of this book. Its core message is that there is the need and potential to further develop educational approaches that will enable a reading of public space as lived space and facilitate a nuanced understanding of the micro-scale of everyday 1 2